Robertson: As rivalries go, not much to Texans-Titans

Andre Johnson's 2010 beatdown of Cortland Finnegan is the exception rather than the rule when it comes to the Texans-Titans rivalry, which has seen few high-stakes or emotional affairs over the years.

Photo: Karen Warren, Houston Chronicle

For most of the Houston Texans, the Houston Oilers might as well have been a football team from the leather helmet era. Ships passing in the night twice a year, these two franchises.

No current Texan had yet been born when Bum Phillips coached his final game here and the Luv ya Blue era went dark. Only cornerback Johnathan Joseph and backup quarterback Brandon Weeden were among us when Earl Campbell took his final handoff as an Oiler, and they were still in diapers.

Linebacker Whitney Mercilus was a mere toddler in a family of soccer-loving Haitian immigrants in Akron, Ohio, when Warren Moon tossed the last of his nearly 5,000 Oilers passes in an Astrodome playoff loss to Joe Montana and the Kansas City Chiefs.

Mercilus accurately surmises, "I don't think anybody in this locker room thinks much about it," with the "it" being how the Oilers morphed into the Titans because the city of Houston declined to underwrite a new downtown stadium for owner Bud Adams and soon thereafter Nashville's mayor invited Adams to come on over.

Even coach Bill O'Brien's memories are understandably hazy vis-à-vis the Tyler Rose. O'Brien wouldn't turn 9 until about a month after Campbell's Oilers' debut. Pretty much everything he and his Texans, young or old, know about Campbell stems from what they have gleaned from watching grainy ESPN Classic videos.

"Man, he could knock people backwards, didn't he?" Joseph observed, before asking, "Who was the guy in that famous (clip)?"

Well, yes, J-Joe, he did. And you're thinking of Isiah Robertson, the All-Pro Rams linebacker Campbell treated like a rag doll one afternoon in the Astrodome, circa 1978.

The Texans even have two players this season, rookies Justin Reid and Keke Coutee, whose births followed the Oilers' relocating to Tennessee following the 1996 season.

This is why Texans-Titans is what it is, why the Texans don't care any more about the Titans than they do the Jaguars or the Colts, or vice versa. Save for the occasional fiery interlude – Andre Johnson's coldcocking Cortland Finnegan a few years back comes readily to mind – it's a rivalry of familiarity, not a blood feud, existing only because the two teams are occupants of the same division and must play either other home and away every fall.

It never has become more than that and will never be more than that until Houston's old franchise and Houston's new franchise become true peers concurrently, chasing after the same prize at the same juncture.

Sunday's tussle in Nashville will be their 33rd going back to 2002, when the Texans came into being. In only three of the previous 32 were they both above .500 at game time. Never have they made the playoffs in the same season, although it almost happened in 2011. Just twice (2011, 2016), have they managed winning records in the same season.

Texans vs. Titans: By the numbers

15 – Wins by the Texans since 2002 (9 at home, 6 on the road).

17 – Wins by the Titans since 2002 (10 at home, 7 on the road).

5 – Winning seasons by the Texans since 2002, all in the past seven years.

6 – Winning seasons by the Titans since 2002, but only two in the past seven years.

3 – Times the Texans and the Titans have played when both teams have had a winning record (2011, 2013 when they were both 1-0, and 2016).

2 – Times when both teams have had winning records in the same season (2011, 2016).

4-12 – Texans' record vs. Titans from 2002 through 2009.

7 – Titans' longest winning streak (2005-08).

11-5 – Texans' record from 2010 through 2017).

5 – Texans' longest winning streak (2014-16).

57-14 – Score of the most lopsided Texans win (2017 in Houston).

38-17 – Score of the most lopsided Texans loss (2003 in Nashville).

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Tackle Bruce Matthews, who nearly two-decade-long Hall-of-Fame career bridged the Oilers-to-Titans transition, was hip to this when he said last year, before the Texans pummeled the Titans 57-14, setting a franchise record for points scored: "It definitely helps if both teams are good at the same time. But when one team has been good, the other's been rebuilding. When I was with the Texans (as a Gary Kubiak assistant), the Titans were the team to beat in the AFC South. When I was with the Titans, the Texans were the team to beat in the division."

The ho-hum Texans-Titans dynamic was expected to involve dramatically when the teams landed their franchise quarterbacks. Tennessee got Marcus Mariota in 2015 and the Texans raised the Titans one by drafting Deshaun Watson in 2017. The prospect of these two going into battle for years to come offered much promise and made it easier to start forgetting the likes of Jake Locker and Brock Osweiler. Yet here we sit, still waiting.

Neither young gun broke impressively from the gate Sunday in what became a matched set of season-opening 27-20 losses, although the Texans' stumbling at New England was far less of a shocker than the Titans' face-splatting in storm-battered Miami. Also, Watson closed on a high note, bringing his team most of the way back from a 24-6 deficit built by the defending AFC champions. Mariota's final two passes, thrown after he returned from an elbow injury, would be caught by Dolphins and Blaine Gabbert, the consummate anti-franchise quarterback, was sent in to prevent further damage to Mariota's arm and/or psyche.

Because 0-2 teams infrequently recover sufficiently to make the playoffs – fewer than 12 percent have done so going back to 1990 – Sunday's game looms large for both the Texans and the Titans, which is a good thing if we want more from this rivalry than it has delivered. Mike Vrabel's fiery presence on the Tennessee sideline adds an element of missing intrigue, given that he was O'Brien's defensive coordinator last season and his linebackers coach the previous three campaigns.

But there's no grudge in the match. Vrabel speaks highly of the Texans and they do likewise of him. Boring.

It's to be hoped when the teams meet again the Sunday after Thanksgiving at NRG Stadium they'll still be playing for high stakes. There is one precedent. When they faced off in Nashville the seventh weekend of the 2011 season, the AFC South title was in play. The Texans ended a two-game losing streak with a 41-7 thrashing of the Titans. Tennessee repaid the favor on the season's final Sunday when the Texans botched a two-point conversion attempt in 23-22 nail-biter.

But the Texans had already clinched the division title and the tiebreakers broke badly for the Titans. They still missed the playoffs (Had they qualified, they would have played the Texans in Houston). The Texans, in turn, advanced to the postseason for the first time in their history, then even beat Cincinnati in the wild-card round.

They've gone three more times since, while the Titans didn't return until last season, an most ironic achievement considering the whupping they were handed in Houston.

J.J. Watt, among others, seems disinterested in generating anything personal with the Titans (although we haven't forgotten how much he relished trolling the hapless quarterback Zach Mettenberger for his silly selfie shots). What Watt would like to see happen, however, is for the Texans to step up and channel the old Oilers, especially the Luv Ya Blue bunch. He sincerely wishes they could play just one game wearing the Columbia blue jerseys and the white helmets plastered with the derrick logos.

"When I got down here early on," he said, "I wanted to learn a lot. I learned about Earl Campbell and Bum (Phillips, whose son, Wade, was Watt's first defensive coordinator). I got a chance to meet Bum. It's a great era, and we want to bring that type of excitement and that type of energy to this city, then take it one step further, obviously."

Yeah, obviously. Remembering the Oilers also means remembering they never reached the Super Bowl. Worse, as soon as they changed their name to Titans, they got there. That still hurts.

Dale Robertson is the longest-tenured sports writer at a major daily newspaper in Texas, having spent 18 years with the Houston Post (1972-90) before joining the Houston Chronicle in the fall of 1990. His primary sports duties include covering the Texans, the Houston Marathon, the Shell Houston Open PGA tournament and the U.S. Men’s Clay Court Championship, a stop on the ATP World Tour. He’s also the Chronicle’s wine columnist while writing occasionally about health issues and travel destinations.